Streszczenia / Summaries SBO 2 (2010)

Józef Tadeusz Milik as Archaeologist. A Forgotten Aspect of His Research

Starting with 1952 J. T. Milik took part in a lot of field research inPalestine,JordanandSyria. As a representative of the Jerusalem École Biblique he was one of the leaders of small archaeological teams surveying theQumranarea in March 1952. He discovered the so-calledTimothyCave, visited Cave 2 and Cave 3. He was the first epigrapher to see the Copper Scroll immediately after its discovery (he published it in 1962). In September 1952 he accompanied Father Roland de Vaux in digging Cave 4 and about 1000 fragments of manuscripts passed through his hands. He discovered Cave 5 and participated in discovery of Cave 6.

Milik took part in the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th seasons of excavations atKhirbet Qumran(1953-1956) and at Ain Feshkha in 1958. He was responsible for supervising some sectors of theQumrandig, for the reconstruction of pots, sorting of sherds, entering of objects in the catalogue. He also penetrated theQumranaqueduct and found a parallel one at Hyrcania.

In 1954 he became interested in the earliest phase of the Qumran settlement and (with F.M. Cross) surveyed and identified three Iron age settlements in the valley of Buqe‘ia, which in effect made it possible to identify Qumran with Ir ham-Melah (City of Salt) of Uzziah’s time.

Despite the fact that Milik was invited to Jerusalem to publish the Dead Sea Scrolls he soon extended his field of interest in other directions: 1/ publication of ossuaries from Dominus Flevit, in connection with which he himself dug in three places in the area of Silwan in the valley of Cedron (1958-1960); 2/ preparation of a repertory of monasteries and sanctuaries of Jerusalem and its neighbourhood. He surveyed all the sites and described eighty sanctuaries from theJerusalemarea alone.

In March and July 1955 and in 1974 Milik took part in Father Jean Starcky’s survey expeditions toNabataeaon behalf of the Paris Academy of Inscriptions and Literature. They discovered 974 new Nabataean texts, 48 in Greek, 11 in Latin and 6 in Thamudic. Milik kept working on the inscriptions till the end of his life in 2006. For historians Milik will remain as the Nabataean epigrapher par excellence.

To sum-up: even if Milik was first of all a genius epigrapher and publisher of the scrolls, he certainly can also be called a brilliant philologist and a biblical archaeologist who combined surface research, archaeological digging and competent knowledge of Biblical texts in a unique way.

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Maciej Münnich

Reszef i Nergal w Ebla

Resheph and Nergal at Ebla

The West-Semitic god Resheph arouses much controversy due to his supposed chthonic character and rule in the world of the dead. One of the key arguments used by the proponents of such a view of Resheph is his identification with the Mesopotamian Nergal. The earliest example of such identification may be found in theEblatexts. It transpires, however, that until the Old Akkadian period Nergal did not have the features of a chthonic deity. It was not until the reign of Sargon the Great that Nergal came to be identified with the Sumerian deity Meslamtaea, which resulted in the attribution of rule over the land of the dead to Nergal (possibly for political reasons). This means that the equation of Nergal and Resheph inEblacould not have been based on their chthonic character. Ascribing the rule of the underworld to Resheph should therefore raise justified doubt.

“You Made the God of the House Upset. Kusarikkum Woke Up.” Relationship Between Home and State Kinds of Worship in the Ancient Near East

The aim of this article is to discuss the role of so-called private religion in the life of the Ancient Near Eastern peoples. The most important question in this matter is the origins and basic form of this kind of religion, especially its cult and private gods. These gods seem to be remains of the tribal life, where the cult of ancestors as well as protective deities was regarded the most important for the survival of family, society and tribe. There is a high probability that the state religion had originated from the private religion of those families, which later became royal, so their religion also turned into official religion of their states. We can also assume that, independently from existing different forms of private religion, “common religion” was growing up within developing societies, especially sedentists and farmers. By common religion we should understand all forms of the cults of natural powers, which are essential for those societies. The questions mentioned at the end of this article are the phenomena of replacing private religion by official gods in the last centuries of Ancient Near Eastern civilizations and an absolute unique phenomenon of the Israeli’s religion, which, unlike all the others, has developed into monotheism.

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Aleksandra Szymkuć

Prorocy i ekstatycy w starożytnej Mezopotamii

Prophets and Ecstatics in Ancient Mesopotamia

The article touches upon the matter of the activity of Mesopotamian prophets and ecstatics in the Old Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian periods. Both prophets and ecstatics conveyed divine messages to the people by the use of variety of means – ecstatic trance, visions and dreams. In the periods brought under discussion their range of activities, framework and the way they were perceived by their contemporaries differed to a large extent. For the citizens of the Old BabyloniankingdomofMaria prophet would only convey the divine words, whereas the Assyrians of the Neo-Assyrian period considered a prophet a mouthpiece of god, a personification of a deity. This paper contains a description of the prophetic activity in the two aforementioned periods, as well as a brief analysis of two collections of the prophetic texts. Thanks to the cuneiform sources we are able to trace different stages of formation of prophecy as a cultural phenomenon and indicate certain changes it underwent over time.

The Historical Context of the Biblical Mention about the Selling of Joseph into Egypt (Gen 37:27-28,36) in the Light of the Ugaritic Sources

The aim of the paper is to present the documentary evidence fromUgarit, which can be interpreted as a possible echo of a distant past for the episode of Joseph’s sale toEgypt(Gen 36:26). According to Ugaritic sources, the stipulation to sell the guarantors toEgyptif they failed to pay their debt constitutes the additional penalty clause of the legal transaction. The rhetorical question which occurs in the one of documents, “How can a man sell his own fellow to the Egyptians?”, shows that the ultimate ethical evaluation of these practices was explicitly negative. To have been sentenced to slavery inEgyptstood for one of the most severe punishment. This conclusion can be compared with the biblical designation ofEgyptas the “house of slavery” and the hard service and oppression that Hebrews had to suffer in the building projects in the time of Ramesses II, contemporary to the Ugaritic sources.

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Edward Lipiński

Niewolnictwo w środowisku zachodniosemickim i P. Samaria 6

The Slavery in West-Semitic Societies and Pap. Samaria 6

The legal and social condition of slaves in West-Semitic societies appears in a somewhat concreter light thanks to the Samaria papyri from Wadi Daliyeh. Most of them concern sale of slaves and they all date from the late Persian period. These documents are badly damaged, but their reconstitution is feasible to a certain extent, because they are written according to a fixed pattern. A translation of Pap. Samaria 6 with some comments is thus presented in the article with special attention to slavery resulting from insolvency and to possible legal consequences implied by a formal sale of such slaves.

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Sebastian Długoborski

Sakralne trofea wojenne w świetle tekstów biblijnych

Sacral Trophies of War in the Light of the Biblical Texts

This paper examines several biblical texts that recount a circumstance in which a trophy that is specifically linked to Yhwh has been taken by the victorious enemy. An event of this sort is easily interpreted as a humiliating defeat for Yhwh as well as forIsrael. These “trophy-narratives” deny this interpretation and reassure their audience of the undiminished power of their god. The narratives acknowledge a military defeat but go on to describe the enemy’s triumph ceremony in which a miraculous event attributed to Yhwh reverses the power relations embodied in the ceremony. The result is the symbolic triumph of Yhwh over the enemy’s god. The biblical narrator successfully converts the shaming of the trophy, which has been closely linked to Yhwh, into an occasion of honor for his god. A military defeat that has been suffered byIsraelis transformed, at the divine level, into a theological victory.

The promise of Peter’s primacy has been the subject of intensive exegetical research, which has focused on its literary and linguistic aspects in recent years. The results of that research are summed up in the first part of the study. The second part offers a hermeneutic interpretation of the text from the perspective of the initiatory approach. Considered within the initiatory approach, the text of the promise of Peter’s primacy reveals the internal structure of the ecclesia at a certain stage in the initiation of the early Church. It is a community of believers in Jesus as the Messiah – that is, a community of catechumens. Peter wields twofold power in that community: the power of the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven and the power to bind and loose. The power to bind and loose concerns catechumens, whereas the power of the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven applies to pre-catechumens.

The Everyday Language of Judea in the First and Second Century A.D. in the Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls

The subject of the article is the linguistic situation in Judea as regards the usage of colloquial varieties of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. It discusses four particular issues: social and geographical range of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and the reciprocal influences of these languages; the usage of Qumran Hebrew as a non-literary language; dialectal and stylistic classification of the Hebrew in the Bar Kokhba texts and the Copper Scroll; the status of Greek in the period before the Bar Kokhba Revolt. The research is based on the linguistic material of Qumran literary works as well as first and second century documents with an emphasis on the collection of Yadin.

From Pottery to Glass: Glass Vessels in the Ancient Palestine on the Basis of Finds from Hippos (Sussita)

The article presents the glass material discovered at Hippos by the Polish and Israeli teams during the excavations conducted there between 2000-2009. The repertoire of glass vessels covers the period from the late Hellenistic through Early Islamic periods. The earliest glass is represented by the late Hellenistic to early Roman-period cast vessels. However, the majority of glass finds are blown vessels dated to the Roman-period and later. After a short presentation of the main forms (cups, deep and shallow bowls, bottles, drinking vessels, beakers, wine glasses and lamps), the author discusses in more detail some glass assemblages and their value for interpretation of one of the discovered buildings. Still another problem is that concerning glass vessels used in liturgical context. Thanks to the discoveries in Sussita the author is able to provide a tentative picture of the glass assemblages characteristic of churches and to determine which of the vessels might have served a liturgical function.